The production of homologies and the role of the state: The long history of the danish ghettolist

This paper focuses on the production of homologies and the struggle to synchronize particular principles of vision across different fields and spaces in order to have the given point of view recognized, legitimized, institutionalized and naturalized, that is taken for granted. Specifically we point toward the relations between the state, symbolic space, social space and physical space. The paper presents some of the findings of our forthcoming book on ‘The State of the Fragmenting City’ (Edward Elgar/working title).

To outline the role of the state in these struggles and in the production of homologies we briefly outline our neo-bourdieusian model of the state geared for empirical confrontation taking departure in the concept of policy-field. We do this in the theory section. Then we have divided our analytical section of the paper in to two parts. Part 1. Outlines the ‘policy-field of not-for-profit housing’ as a field of forces and its transformations from 1996 to 2019. Rather that applying MCA we use historizing institutional mapping to produce a topology of the policy-field at different stages. In part 2. We present the policy-field as a field of struggle specifically the struggles over the gradual invention and institutionalization of the ghetto-list as a particular forms of governance relying on the explicit production and application of territorial stigmatization. The emphasis of the analysis of these struggles is on the years 2005-2010 but it is not limited to these.

What we hope to achieve with this compositions – apart from highlighting the importance of including the state in the analysis of social space – is to underscore the relevance of the historizing mode of analysis which we apply here in the analysis of the policy-field both as field of forces and as field of struggle and the relations between the two.